"Pono, the Neil Young-endorsed Kickstarter project, is drawing more and more pledges. Now past the $2 million mark (with an expected goal of $800K), this project aims to create a audiophile friendly FLAC player along with its ecosystem (and by that they mean their own music store and syncing application).

The device itself features 2 audio outputs, one 'specially designed for headphones' and the other 'specifically designed for listening on your home audio system'. The player is controlled by an LCD touchscreen, and its triangular 'Toblerone' shape makes it easy to hold it upright with one hand or to lay it flat on surfaces. The player, which has 64GB of internal memory, comes together with a 64GB microSD card.

The board and its components, as well as a 'pre-prototype' model, are pictured in the project's Kickstarter page.

Re:The "Monster Cable" of Music PlayersRe:The "Monster Cable" of Music Players(Score: 4, Insightful) by evilviper on Thursday March 13 2014, @07:13PM

Well, it's a combination of a couple real issues, combined with misunderstanding of technology, combined with people that buy all the "monster cable" marketing BS.

Some facts: It is true that the more you compress an MP3 or AAC the worse they sound. It is also true that MP3 and AAC are "non-free" file formats.

One might ask is there a real advantage to FLAC?

Actually, there is a REAL problem with the popular lossy audio codecs... No matter how high you crank the bit-rate, they still won't provide audio that is indistinguishable from the original, in side-by-side tests by experts with good equipment.

MP3 and AAC are frequency-domain audio codecs. In short, that means they're good at representing (long) tones, and terrible at representing sudden and varying non-tonal changes. Most often that means percussion, applause, and similar.

The earlier and simpler audio codecs actually did better. MPEG-1 Layer II is a temporal-domain codec, as are Musepack, DTS, and a few other fringe ones. These codecs (at bit rates of around 160kbps and up) are able to reproduce CD quality audio in a way that is utterly indistinguishable from the ~1.5mbps original.

MP3 caught on in the early days, when people were using bit-rates of 96 or 128k to save bandwidth, where something like Layer-II didn't provide good results. So MP3 got popular. Then as bandwidth got cheaper, and music stores appeared, they started provided MP3s (or AAC) at bit-rates of 192 and 256kbps... Bit-rates so high that MP3 or AAC no longer gets any benefit out of it, and where other codecs like Layer-II or Musepack would provide PERFECT sound quality. Also, Musepack is free format, reportedly free of patents, and any patents on layer-II have long since expired.

And any new audio codecs developed are invariable frequency-domain based, because just there's (even theoretically, per JD Johnston's "Perceptual Entropy") just no room to improve at all on the high-end over a good temporal-domain codec like Musepack. So new codecs always target producing non-annoying sound at ever-lower bit-rates (eg. around 32kbps). People buy the hype for the new codecs, and assume they'll sound better than older codecs at 256kbps, when they actually sound worse... For an example, read up on HE-AAC. They tell you which bit-rates SBR (spectral-band replication) and PS (parametric stereo) provide no benefits over the old, low-complexity AAC by itself, and you can prove this to yourself with some listening tests easily enough.

FLAC is the "lossless" sibling of OGG and is released under an open source license.

FLAC didn't have anything to do with Xiph, Vorbis, or Ogg for most of it's life. The two groups simply decided to join forces at some point.

So should you buy one? It depends on your answers to some of these questions: Do you still have good ears? How much is media pricing? Is it a walled garden they are building? Do they have an app that will convert you existing CD collection [all of those your files in MP3/AAC are "worthless" -- To get lossless sound you have to convert it from a lossless source such as a CD]?

I can't see ANY reason to buy one. The majority of adults in the western world keep a smart phone with them at all times... Those smart phones have ample storage, and there are plenty of apps out there that will play FLAC. I've never heard any complaints about the sound quality of the amplification circuits in smart phones, since they've got big budgets to work with, and playing music is one of their key features... And anyone who doesn't have a smart phone, can find slightly older models available dirt-cheap with only cosmetic blemishes and slightly reduced battery life.

Maybe there's some tiny market... People who are going to be far away from a power outlet for weeks at a time, can't carry a solar panel, and for some reason aren't happy with the numerous other digital audio players that already support FLAC (or other lossless formats). I'd expect that to be an extremely tiny market, though.

--Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.